Policies are used for a variety of purposes. For instances, polices may be used to authorize or authenticate a user, enforce service level agreements, allocate resources, determine which services a subscriber/user is allowed to access, privacy policies, and usage polices. One example of a policy management system is the IETF policy management architecture. The IETF architecture includes a policy management service for administering policies and policy enforcement points that enforce policies based on the policy rules. Other exemplary environments that use policies include web service activities (e.g., choreography of events, security), Web-Services-Policy (WS-Policy), Object Management Architecture (OMA) activities, and Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
A policy based system may implement policies by defining rules. A rule defines a condition that must be satisfied for an action to be executed. For example, a rule may take the form “If conditions, then action.” Thus, in the prior art, policies are conditions that must be satisfied at the time the condition is evaluated. In some instances, multiple conditions may need to be simultaneously satisfied.